Photoshop CC: modest upgrades shackled to terrible “rental” model

Review: Motion blur gets addressed, but renting Creative Cloud is now the only option.

As the big dog of image editors, any change to Photoshop impacts a lot of people—professionals and hobbyists alike. But with the contentious Creative Cloud licensing model, Adobe’s recent moves seem to have touched more of a nerve. We look at Photoshop CC’s new features and license to see if it’s worth the leap from software ownership to rental.

If you do any sort of image editing, you’ve probably heard about Photoshop Creative Cloud (CC), the unified successor to Photoshop CS6 Standard and Extended. But you most likely recognize this phrase because of the now-infamous Creative Cloud appended to the name. Even though it's now technically at version 14, Photoshop no longer has versions in the classic sense. You can’t own Photoshop Creative Cloud 1.0 or 2.0 thanks to the new rent-to-never-own licensing scheme. This model is what’s responsible for Creative Cloud’s infamy, but before we get into the specifics of licensing and cloud stuff, let’s review what’s new or updated in the latest Photoshop iteration—many people don't know what it does other than try to reach for your wallet.

Camera Shake Reduction

Photoshop Creative Cloud needs some big features if it’s going to draw people into its new licensing Web, and I’m sure Adobe is hoping that camera shake reduction is one of them. This self-explanatory filter is not fast—and yes, it’s multithreaded—but the results can be very good. After putting it to task on my girlfriend’s travel shots from Berlin with significant motion blurring, I was pleased with the output:

It’s obviously not cover-ready in that state, but with some added retouches and blending between the old unfiltered sky and the sharper building, you could have something that’s usable in a pinch. It does a much better job than the Smart Sharpen, which doesn’t do as good a job with motion blur estimation. Considering that Smart Sharpen was my previous go-to filter for motion blur reduction, I’d say we have a very good tool for both professionals and amateurs here.

Smart Sharpen

While this is mostly a rejigging of the CS6’s Smart Sharpen into a better interface with an expandable preview pane, Photoshop Creative Cloud's filter adds a Reduce Noise slider:

This makes it easier to sharpen images that have either a high-ISO or are otherwise noisy. The results aren’t as good as something like Neat Image (the gold standard of sharpening while doing noise reduction), but they are good. Ostensibly, the Smart Sharpen filter is also able to reduce halo effects from over-sharpening that you see with an Unsharp Mask.

While I certainly understand the hate dumped on their rental-only policy, the system works for me. If I'm away from an internet connection for more than 30-days I'm probably never coming back to the internet, much less needing to work in Photoshop. I think the pricing is right for what you get, but if all you want is one program from the suite (or even two or three) then the cost is waaaay off. Like I said, it works for me.

BUT, their install process is complete shitburgers. Most importantly, there was no 1-click way to remove CS6 (installed from CC subscription, not disc). I had to run the uninstaller for each program. Total nightmare and I had the same problem with CC App trying to update everything despite having just updated everything.

Another issue with their Cloud system is that students get the shaft (as seems to be typical with any sort of cloud or digital-only based system) just as when Apple switched to the MAS, and Microsoft to 365 (for Apple, much of their software is now cheaper as many have been split up but just no longer has any edu pricing, and Microsoft's 365 pricing isn't *too* bad outside of it being a 4-year license instead of a perpetual one).

Whatever features that are improved don't really mean much when the prices double (literally) for a perpetual license, and are several hundred more for even a year's worth of use over current prices. Unless you are only testing out the design field for a year of school or your own personal testing, then only time will tell what this does to their future user base that was all but guaranteed before the CC (beyond those currently in the industry who are forced to use it).

(For example, the old prices were $199 for the Design Standard, $599 for the Master Collection, $55 for Acrobat Pro, and so on for perpetual student licenses)

GIMP is good enough for professional work if you take the time to learn how to use it properly. It takes three times as long to learn, but there are very few things you can't do with it. And even though you may produce work of the same quality, you won't be taken seriously by your peers. Face it, your peers can be jerks sometimes.

This new Adobe model is just awful, any work you do it basically locked to that version. This means that if you eventually don't want to keep paying it you lose all your work, as you cannot open your files anymore.

You don't own anything anymore. You are the product. What is worst is that Adobe copied the worst about the cloud model and not the best. Can you rent this products only for a few hours? No. You can't, so they are wrongly called cloud, as they are not metered. You cannot pay the products just for a few hours, or just one or two of them.

You need to buy the whole package, all the products and for a long period. They really killed the best of cloud products, and took only the worst. Does this software use Adobe servers? No. It uses my CPU, my video card and I PAY the energy to run my computer and their products. How in the world is this cloud?

Its my computer, my video card, my ram and my CPU.

Adobe will see ALLOT of new competitors popping up very soon. The casual Adobe client is dead. The one that wanted to own a software, just one of two of them.

This model is so absolutely awful and that will be Adobes end as a company. If their investors do not realize this, someone else is going to eat their customers cake.

For the only people that this can possible work is for Adobe heavy users, those that use multiple products every day and their work depends on their products.

For the rest of the population, Adobe is dead.

I also feel scammed by Adobe because I purchased at least 3 owned softwares in the last year, and now they will never again receive updates. Adobe scammed, me I would not had paid over 500$ per software if I knew I was getting an EOL software.

If the new licensing scheme was intended to prevent piracy, it didn’t work. As I mentioned above, the pirates actually get the installers and no logins that paying customers don’t have access to. Figure that one out.

As much as Microsoft and Adobe would like to convince you that this is the future, it's a lousy setup that punishes paying customers who deserve the right to own their software.

This is precisely the problem I have with practically all DRM. Using the "product" according to licensing terms is difficult and annoying, yet it does nothing to diminish piracy. Acquiring "pirated" copies removes the hassle but instantly makes you a criminal, even for items you have paid - or are paying - money to use. Product support from customers is rewarded with contempt from companies that insist that the rights we have are the ones they give us. Good luck with 'the future'. BTW, NOT upgrading my creative suite.

I'm curious. I've only ever used GIMP for really basic stuff. So, does GIMP really offer everything Photoshop does when it comes to the real professional? In other words, is it a viable alternative for professional/commercial artists?

For me - sure, but at best, all I do is caption cat pics. So, I'm as far from pro as you can get.

There are probably a lot of you reading this who never actually got to look at the feature set of Photoshop CC because Adobe’s Creative Cloud licensing made it all a non-starter.

Well, I did look out of a sense of technical curiosity (though as it happens "modest" is definitely the right adjective), but yeah, CC means it's basically out of consideration. Unless Adobe alters course, CS6 will be the final version we own, but that same licensing may make "modest" upgrades the rule, not the exception, which would, in a perverse way, serve to draw the sting a bit.

Fundamentally, one of my major long term concerns with a rental service model applied to software as opposed to standard sales or rent-to-own is how it changes the incentives for the developers, and the effect that has on the software in question. Developers can talk about higher goals and technical challenges and such until they're blue in the face, but at the core of the market is people responding to money. When the customer owns each version they get then in turn it follows that the developer must create a compelling reason for each upgrade. Every review will have a bottom line, recommended-or-not, every decision will get weighed, and if they drop a stinker, they don't get paid, simple as that. There are firm deadlines and clear metrics, there is the psychological pressure that comes from needing to win and needing to be hungry to win. It's immediately obvious after every upgrade whether it was well focused or not, because the market provides the most direct, basic form of feedback there is. Were the features that devs thought important the same ones customers did? It's all carrot, little stick (eventually bugs/compatibility does create a bit of upward pressure).

Rental however removes all that feedback and the resulting pressure. Did people keep paying because they love everything you're doing, or because they're forced to or they're screwed? Rather then having to earn every new payment, payment becomes enshrined as the base assumption, only something massively negative might cause a real change in the short term. As the article says, eventually competitors of sufficient quality might develop, but for the immediate future Adobe has a strong entrenched position and has simultaneous removed the direct market response mechanism they did have. That makes them, in many ways, smell strongly of other entrenched monopolies, and we can see the stagnation that commonly results.

I'm sure many Adobe accountants and managers themselves are delighted over the thought of no longer having to work so hard at every update or make their case every single year, but merely be able to do whatever and not screw up too badly. But I wonder how it will look in another few years, because locking in customers doesn't typically seem to cause companies to become desperate to improve the quality of their offering. It's unfortunate, and in the very long term could even come bike to bite Adobe in the butt, because while shifts take a very, very long time, once they get going they have a lot of momentum. Just talking this same, exact market area, Adobe themselves did this Quark. Were it possible back then, it's very, very easy to imagine late-90s Quark jumping all over this kind of licensing scheme to add-on to the joy people experienced with QuarkXPress, and in turn making the release of InDesign that much more impactful.

I'm curious. I've only ever used GIMP for really basic stuff. So, does GIMP really offer everything Photoshop does when it comes to the real professional? In other words, is it a viable alternative for professional/commercial artists?

For me - sure, but at best, all I do is caption cat pics. So, I'm as far from pro as you can get.

I can't comment on raster print layout. I don't do print. But for web design and DC image manipulation, yeah. I've been doing web design on the side for years and I use GIMP. GIMP has a steep learning curve though. And even then, it sometimes takes multiple steps to achieve the same effects which PS has as a built-in filter for and it's easier.

Here's another nasty scenario that I often see: a GIF from a company’s site is the only thing they have to use for a print logo.

I used to have this problem when I was setting up branded websites for new customers. The logo wasn't print, but it needed to be a certain size, and when you resize small web .GIF logos you get horrible fuzziness. And it was hopeless emailing the company for a high-resolution logo-- it would take weeks if not months for them to find it, assuming they even knew what it was.

What I would do was use Google Image Search for "company_name logo". I would invariably find the logo, not on the company's web site, but some cheap "yellow pages" type site. Usually the site was designed by idiots who had somehow managed to find a high-resolution logo but didn't know how to resize images, so the OMGXBOXHUEG logo was just resized by the browser instead. Right click, Save Image As, and voila, a high-res logo!

It pleased me to no end whenever this worked, because it was basically using two types of stupidity to cancel each other out!

I'm curious. I've only ever used GIMP for really basic stuff. So, does GIMP really offer everything Photoshop does when it comes to the real professional? In other words, is it a viable alternative for professional/commercial artists?

For me - sure, but at best, all I do is caption cat pics. So, I'm as far from pro as you can get.

I can't comment on raster print layout. I don't do print. But for web design and DC image manipulation, yeah. I've been doing web design on the side for years and I use GIMP. GIMP has a steep learning curve though. And even then, it sometimes takes multiple steps to achieve the same effects which PS has as a built-in filter for and it's easier.

Here's another nasty scenario that I often see: a GIF from a company’s site is the only thing they have to use for a print logo.

I used to have this problem when I was setting up branded websites for new customers. The logo wasn't print, but it needed to be a certain size, and when you resize small web .GIF logos you get horrible fuzziness. And it was hopeless emailing the company for a high-resolution logo-- it would take weeks if not months for them to find it, assuming they even knew what it was.

What I would do was use Google Image Search for "company_name logo". I would invariably find the logo, not on the company's web site, but some cheap "yellow pages" type site. Usually the site was designed by idiots who had somehow managed to find a high-resolution logo but didn't know how to resize images, so the OMGXBOXHUEG logo was just resized by the browser instead. Right click, Save Image As, and voila, a high-res logo!

It pleased me to no end whenever this worked, because it was basically using two types of stupidity to cancel each other out!

HAHAHA! Yeah I do that too. Or how about companies that disable the right click on the logo, or hide it under a transparent PNG, or make it a background referenced in a CSS file (one of a dozen) andthen another object placed on top so you can't save the background? Jesus fucking Christ. How do they expect me to use their logo to promote their shit on my client's web site??? So I just google image 'company name logo' and find a beautiful > 1MP PNG with transparency on some 3rd party site. Awesome.

Personally, since I use at least 6 products from the suite it is actually a reasonable cost but I would hate it if I only wanted to use a one or two of the programs. The fact that I don't own them outright is annoying but not a deal breaker for me.

But really, I just cant understand why they don't have different purchase options available so people could pay for the products the way they would prefer, lets face it, if the subscription model is so great people will gravitate to it naturally anyway.

As a person who uses Adobe art/design products professionally (mainly Illustrator), this is another nail in the coffin for Adobe.

They already had amongst the highest, if not the highest, cost of ownership for their creative software. The Rent but never own model makes this worse.

Their UI/UX team seem hamstrung by unnecessarily obscure backwards compatibility, one-mouse-button thinking, excessive keyboard-combos and byzantine processes which all contribute negatively by extending workflow times and making simple tasks more difficult than competing products. They wouldn't know how to create an intuitive or user friendly product if their life depended on it.

On top of this they piled on DRM that makes installing the pirate version a worthy choice for legitimate Creative Suite owners, like myself, just so you can use it across your hardware without hassles.

Corel is looking more and more attractive by the day, it's just so much faster to use because it seems to have been designed with an artist in mind, rather than a Command-line using Linux-beard. Whilst their software may not know every trick in the Adobe book, Corel products can use most of the same Plug-ins and can output to industry standard formats.

It is, in fact, testament to how abysmal Adobe workflow is that I use Corel software up until the point where I have to use Adobe software because I need a certain feature for the job. I look forward to the day where finishing on Adobe is an unnecessary step for me. In future I may just skip it anyway, purely on time/cost grounds.

I agree that the GIMP will always be a marginal product, but for those who need the equivalent of an older version of Photoshop, I find Paint.NET handles my needs. No, pros probably can't migrate to it, but its great for so many things. No worries about the interface either. Its very close to an older version of Photoshop.

I'm still on CS5. I'd love to take advantage of the "upgrade" at $29.95 a month, but that price is only if you pay for a year as a lump sum. Sorry Adobe, I just don't use Photoshop, much less the whole suite,enough to warrant that kind of outlay. Give me the $29.95 on month-to-month and it'll seem reasonable enough when in need with the option to take some months off when my projects are light on work the suite satiates, and make sure I can leave CS5 installed in parallel for emergencies.

The implications of Adobe's pricing model is that Photoshop is a product for professionals or those who are wealthy enough not to care about the money. On the other hand, they appear to be pricing Lightroom at a level that is reasonably comfortable for serious amateurs.

The implications of Adobe's pricing model is that Photoshop is a product for professionals or those who are wealthy enough not to care about the money. On the other hand, they appear to be pricing Lightroom at a level that is reasonably comfortable for serious amateurs.

That points to what is going on with Lightroom vs other Creative Cloud apps: it has very real competition in the form of Aperture and a few other apps. If Illustrator still competition, it would probably also have a traditional upgrade path at a decent price. Adobe is only able to do this because of its entrenchment.

It will be several years before I move beyond CS6 unless Adobe changes its sales strategy radically and starts selling full licenses again. It is even more likely that I will slowly move everything off Adobe products.

This is nothing more than a protection racket.

Want to access your CC developed files two or three years from now? You know those files you created that your livelihood depends upon? Pay us or else. Pay us every month (or a lump sum once a year) or else -- bye bye to your livelihood. We here at Adobe now own your future. Pay us our "little fee" every month or say goodbye to your files! (At least we're not threatening your kneecaps or your thumbs. You should thank us for that!)

As a person who uses Adobe art/design products professionally (mainly Illustrator), this is another nail in the coffin for Adobe.

They already had amongst the highest, if not the highest, cost of ownership for their creative software. The Rent but never own model makes this worse.

Their UI/UX team seem hamstrung by unnecessarily obscure backwards compatibility, one-mouse-button thinking, excessive keyboard-combos and byzantine processes which all contribute negatively by extending workflow times and making simple tasks more difficult than competing products. They wouldn't know how to create an intuitive or user friendly product if their life depended on it.

On top of this they piled on DRM that makes installing the pirate version a worthy choice for legitimate Creative Suite owners, like myself, just so you can use it across your hardware without hassles.

Corel is looking more and more attractive by the day, it's just so much faster to use because it seems to have been designed with an artist in mind, rather than a Command-line using Linux-beard. Whilst their software may not know every trick in the Adobe book, Corel products can use most of the same Plug-ins and can output to industry standard formats.

It is, in fact, testament to how abysmal Adobe workflow is that I use Corel software up until the point where I have to use Adobe software because I need a certain feature for the job. I look forward to the day where finishing on Adobe is an unnecessary step for me. In future I may just skip it anyway, purely on time/cost grounds.

Interesting perspective. From where I sit, Adobe's worst problem is horrid legacy code and horrid security track record. Their code looks like something out of the 90s (probably because it is...) and their security vulnerabilities over the past couple of years are rivaled only by Oracle. Another company with clueless and/or legacy developers. I just renamed an Oracle E1 machine and their software stopped working. Turned out, they hardcoded the machine name in 70 (seventy!) different places in the registry and in the various .cfg files and even created files and folders on file system referencing the machine name. And of course, their software stops working if a different user logs in, too, because the installer places machine-wide settings in HKCU. Ugh. The E1 DB connection string to the Oracle DB was found in PLAIN TEXT, yeah the user and the password, in a cfg file. That type of thing, from where I sit, is the biggest problem with software developed by some (most?) companies today. May look fine on the surface, but it is utter shit underneath.

The implications of Adobe's pricing model is that Photoshop is a product for professionals or those who are wealthy enough not to care about the money. On the other hand, they appear to be pricing Lightroom at a level that is reasonably comfortable for serious amateurs.

That points to what is going on with Lightroom vs other Creative Cloud apps: it has very real competition in the form of Aperture and a few other apps. If Illustrator still competition, it would probably also have a traditional upgrade path at a decent price. Adobe is only able to do this because of its entrenchment.

Has InDesign effectively marginalized Quark? It's been a couple years since I used ID for a living, but Quark was a solid competitor...at an even worse price point. Hmm, perhaps I've answered my own question.

Now that I have you all here.... I haven't used PS since about PS 7. Do they still use the scratch disk? Or have they finally learned they should let the operating system do what it does best: manage memory? I swear most of the PS archaisms come from legacy code base dating back to Mac OS 9. It just got recycled and recompiled.

QuarkXPress use has dried up a lot in the past years but it's a solid program. I use Indesign for the magazines I design and the publishing company I do them for just moved to CS6 for the same reason everyone else just did: because they never intend to upgrade to CC

Here's another nasty scenario that I often see: a GIF from a company’s site is the only thing they have to use for a print logo.

I used to have this problem when I was setting up branded websites for new customers. The logo wasn't print, but it needed to be a certain size, and when you resize small web .GIF logos you get horrible fuzziness. And it was hopeless emailing the company for a high-resolution logo-- it would take weeks if not months for them to find it, assuming they even knew what it was.

What I would do was use Google Image Search for "company_name logo". I would invariably find the logo, not on the company's web site, but some cheap "yellow pages" type site. Usually the site was designed by idiots who had somehow managed to find a high-resolution logo but didn't know how to resize images, so the OMGXBOXHUEG logo was just resized by the browser instead. Right click, Save Image As, and voila, a high-res logo!

It pleased me to no end whenever this worked, because it was basically using two types of stupidity to cancel each other out!

HAHAHA! Yeah I do that too. Or how about companies that disable the right click on the logo, or hide it under a transparent PNG, or make it a background referenced in a CSS file (one of a dozen) andthen another object placed on top so you can't save the background? Jesus fucking Christ. How do they expect me to use their logo to promote their shit on my client's web site??? So I just google image 'company name logo' and find a beautiful > 1MP PNG with transparency on some 3rd party site. Awesome.

I usually use the 'Page Info' option in the Firefox 'tools' menu to capture those images.

From my standpoint, I think the 'Rent to never own' licensing scheme should be illegal. As a Canadian looking from the outside, I wonder out loud if there is any sort of U.S movement developing where legal users who don't think Adobe is being fair are complaining to their local congressman/woman to see if this can get the attention of lawmakers to create laws that protect legal users from such abusive corporate practices.

Days before Photoshop CC (Credit Card, Constantly Costly, Corporate Corruption, however you want to label it...) was released, contemplating freelancing, I ended up purchasing Photoshop & Illustrator CS6 (that way, I have a legit, perpetual license to use for years to come). I will not support Adobe's greedy, shady subscription practices, and hopefully over time, resistance will continue to grow to the point where Adobe can no longer ignore it. We have proven that collectively, we can force change.. and this is something that really needs changing.

If Illustrator still [had] competition, it would probably also have a traditional upgrade path at a decent price. Adobe is only able to do this because of its entrenchment.

CorelDRAW is a capable alternative to Illustrator. You may not be able tweak everything to the nth degree, but it can more than handle almost all dedicated-amateur and even professional tasks you throw at it. For casual users, there's even a very reasonably priced Home/Student edition for a fraction of the cost if you don't need CMYK outputs and the like.

As a battle hardened Illustrator user (victim?) I found I could do almost everything quickly and intuitively. New users would find CorelDRAW by the far the most friendly and gentle introduction into the slightly odd world of Vector-based illustration. The only obvious dealbreaker for some is it is Windows only.